Long before Donald Trump was in the same room with Vladimir Putin, experts predicted that the Russian president would make psychological mincemeat of his American counterpart. “I worry that the style of this president may push toward a meeting that isn’t fully fleshed out,” a former senior State Department official told my colleague Abigail Tracy. “And, to my mind, that plays to Russia’s advantage.” That, as it turns out, was a severe under-statement; as the one-on-one meeting between Trump and Putin—at which only interpreters were present—stretched well past the planned 90-minute mark, observers waited with bated breath for them to emerge. When they did, it quickly became clear that Trump had melted into putty in Putin’s capable hands, reciting his favorite talking points about the election and the Russia probe with newfound zeal. “I think the probe is a disaster for our country. I think it’s kept us apart. It’s kept us separated. There was no collusion at all. Everybody knows it,” he said, adding that the U.S. was at fault for the chilled relationship between the two. “I hold both countries responsible. I think that the United States has been foolish. I think we’ve all been foolish.”

Even before the worrisomely lengthy meeting, however, there were signs that things would not go as planned (that is, if you can call anything about the Russia summit “planned”). As befitting two presidents with aggressively authoritarian impulses, Trump and Putin kicked things off with a series of maneuvers seemingly designed to one-up each other. First Putin, notorious for flexing his alpha tendencies by arriving late to meetings, touched down in Helsinki just minutes before the summit was scheduled to begin. As The Guardian’s Andrew Roth pointed out, Putin kept Trump waiting longer than he did Pope Francis, but not quite as long as Putin’s more immediate foes in Eastern Europe and Germany.

For his part, Trump was delayed in leaving his hotel, forcing Putin to arrive at the venue first. The Russian president countered by showing up in an aggressively militarized limousine that, according to The Washington Post, is 22 feet long and 5-and-a-half feet tall, built to rival Trump’s own limo, known as the “the Beast,” which outweighs Putin’s ride by at least a ton.

The two then posed for a photo op, in which Putin—perhaps strategically—placed a notebook and a pen on the table between them, and the worrisomely notebook-less president struck a decidedly non-confrontational pose, slouching in his chair and throwing the Russian president a conspiratorial wink.

If possible, the president’s remarks were even less adversarial than his body language; he made no mention before the meeting of the indictment of a dozen Russian intelligence officials for hacking the Democratic National Committee in 2016, a circumstance he tweeted about just once over the weekend, casting the blame on Barack Obama’s administration. And when he emerged from the meeting two hours later, he appeared to side with Putin over his own intelligence agencies. ”Where are the servers?” he asked a stunned room, presumably referring to Hillary Clinton’s e-mails and the D.N.C.’s compromised servers. ”My people came to me . . . they said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin. He just said it’s not Russia. I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be, but I really do want to see the server. So I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.” (As if to highlight Trump’s inanity, Putin told later told reporters, “Yes, I did [want Trump to win the election]. Yes, I did. Because he talked about bringing the U.S.-Russia relationship back to normal.”)

Putin chimed in, insisting once again that Russia had not interfered in the election, and going so far as to suggest that Russia and the United States form a ”working group” to get to the bottom of the whole thing. ”I think that's an incredible offer,” said Trump, who periodically leaned over to see whether Putin had agreed or responded to his praises.